The GrowthStack

We decode why smart teams still make dumb growth decisions.

[The GrowthStack @thegrowthstack_]

LinkedIn is Hot Garbage.

AI Slop is hurting you more than you think.

Insta can you help A/B test copy and messaging you can use everywhere?

More hot takes 👇

[Arnav Bhardwaj @Arnav_ct]

Episode 42: The Homepage Was Never a Part of Your Marketing Funnel.

Joanna Wiebe (@copyhackers) is a best-selling author and the person who coined conversion copywriting, having worked with companies like @Canva, @Intuit, and @awscloud on messaging that actually moves people.

She argues that the anxiety around AI replacing copywriters is misplaced, because the control marketers thought they had over conversions was always an illusion. On a good day, 2% from "a hyper optimized funnel". The rest were brainstorming sessions dressed up as strategy.

ChatGPT can generate a thousand variations of a headline in three seconds, but it can't read the silence between two complaints in a one-star review. That's the moat.

In our conversation, we got into:

✅Why your website was never the funnel you thought it was
✅How LLMs have moved buying decisions offsite, and what you can actually do about it
✅Why fake reviews and the synthetic voice of customers aren't new problems
✅How to validate messaging without the traffic volume for a reliable A/B test
✅What separates the copywriters who thrive from the ones AI will quietly replace

Listen Now 👉 https://t.co/BK6lM3wT5A

[Myosin.xyz (〽️, 🌎) @myosin_xyz]

https://t.co/aL4B9vfQXE

[Arnav Bhardwaj @Arnav_ct]

Going Live in 25 mins @myosin_xyz

Spicy news on OpenAI vs Apple, Reddit marketing hot takes and AI ads being a dud?

Ending with our audience favourite gamified(sneak peak: riddle me this, riddle me that👀)

[Arnav Bhardwaj @Arnav_ct]

Episode 45: Your 100 Discord members don't give a F*** about you, here's why

@jonobacon spent two decades building the communities everyone still points to. Director of community at @github and @Canonical and author of The Art of Community and People Powered.

Silicon Valley just rediscovered community because paid CAC broke and AI ate the SEO. I skipped the cliché engagement-and-Discord advice and went to the dirty grunt work to figure out whats changing with community building.

He told me the default playbook is wrong, forums and @discord only ever capture the loudest 20% of your community, and he now recommends against leading with them.

Then he said the thing no other interview has gotten out of him, about how he watched his own best work lose, and he knows exactly why.

In our conversation, we got into:

✅The 20% trap that makes most community programs measure the wrong people
✅Why does he call it a shithead move to deploy AI agents that pretend to be human
✅The audience in the middle that every founder is walking past
✅FOMO or inertia: which one actually gets people to move
✅The community he built that everyone loves and nobody bought

Listen now 👉 https://t.co/weWMW907hC

[Arnav Bhardwaj @Arnav_ct]

Episode 44: 85% of people distrust AI, so why is every company betting billions on it?

@TheTimenator took Grammarly (now @Superhuman ) past half a billion in revenue and has advised @brexHQ @canva , @airtable , @otter_ai and @drink_AG1 .

His read on the AI startup boom is the reality check the tech hype cycle keeps skipping.

We got into why the money pouring into AI features mostly never reaches the top line, and why "smarter product" rarely means "more revenue."

Yuriy argues that most founders are blind to a pricing ceiling their customers already hit, so every new feature is value they can't charge for.

He also makes the case that the product moat isn't dead; it just moved. When every competitor can copy your feature in a week, focus becomes the defensible thing, which is exactly how Grammarly beat Google and Microsoft at grammar checking.

In our conversation:

✅ Why AI is making software more expensive to run and no easier to sell
✅ The pricing ceiling almost every founder is blind to
✅ Where the real moat lives once every feature is copyable in a week
✅ The subsidy is running for half of these companies today, and the exact moment it ends

Listen now 👉
https://t.co/Su2RLauH7c

[Arnav Bhardwaj @Arnav_ct]

85% of Americans hold neutral-to-negative views on AI.

While many companies perceive this as a messaging challenge, @TheTimenator from Superhuman sees it as a product opportunity.

He thinks people are not merely worried about AI in a vague sense; they have specific concerns:

- Losing control over their output.
- Uncertainty about whether the ideas in their work are genuinely theirs.
- Handing over work and not recognizing what comes back.

@Superhuman addresses these fears directly by allowing users to direct the AI as they would a team.

[Myosin.xyz (〽️, 🌎) @myosin_xyz]

There's a subtle hint about the brand in the video

Can you get it?

[Arnav Bhardwaj @Arnav_ct]

most startups are leaving this completely untapped.

@TheTimenator broke down why every founder shouldn't build a personal brand and where, why, and how performance ads should be used for growth

P.s good to see ya'll back on my timeline again!

Full ep👇

[Myosin.xyz (〽️, 🌎) @myosin_xyz]

Ad-oholic: Watch a few seconds of a famous ad, then race to name the brand.

Nobody clocked that the nail ad was Pinterest.

@victoriaemmme nailed the IKEA ad at the buzzer.

Turns out naming a brand from just 3s clip is harder than it looks.

w/ @kalashnikovapv and @Arnav_ct

[Arnav Bhardwaj @Arnav_ct]

your AI Agent ALSO needs an onboarding process.

- yes, just like a human.

@TheTimenator, HoG @Superhuman broke down why most people describe their process to an LLM and let it run, and why that's exactly where agentic AI workflows break down

full ep👉https://t.co/l9YKtW7OeS

[The GrowthStack @thegrowthstack_]

we are so back ya'll!

[Arnav Bhardwaj @Arnav_ct]

most startups are leaving this completely untapped.

@TheTimenator broke down why every founder shouldn't build a personal brand and where, why, and how performance ads should be used for growth

P.s good to see ya'll back on my timeline again!

Full ep👇

[The GrowthStack @thegrowthstack_]

Full Ep👉 https://t.co/nyhNTogFaY

[The GrowthStack @thegrowthstack_]

Complaining users on Reddit are not a buying signal.

But as @bmoesta put it, "bitchin ain't switching."

Learning a new tool is f*kin hard, an most companies fail to see it.

[The GrowthStack @thegrowthstack_]

Full ep:
https://t.co/ZsFnaeWFiH

[The GrowthStack @thegrowthstack_]

Having a brand that makes people read,

and believe in you rather than AI summaries of you is a real moat,

against the LLM dictating how you reach your customers.

[The GrowthStack @thegrowthstack_]

Full ep: https://t.co/ZsFnaeWFiH

[The GrowthStack @thegrowthstack_]

Most copywriters are writers who stumbled into selling.

@copyhackers, who invented conversion copywriting, argue that a category error is why most copy"writing" fails to convert

And why she wants to retire the word "copywriting" entirely.

[Arnav Bhardwaj @Arnav_ct]

Startups are obsessed with Category Creation.

DocuSign tried to "create a category" but failed.

Anthony broke down whats the difference is between thinking you are creating one vs actually creating one.

Full ep- https://t.co/XBbwffjb4f

[The GrowthStack @thegrowthstack_]

Lovable is playing Anthropic's game and its gonna lose without even realising it

[Arnav Bhardwaj @Arnav_ct]

The question every founder is sitting with right now is some version of: what happens when Anthropic or OpenAI decides to do what we do?

@apierriPMM 's answer was a fascinating one on our latest episode.

Specialization is the only asymmetric lever a small company has. Not better technology. Not faster iteration. The kind of specialization that makes a vertical so narrow and so deeply served that it becomes genuinely uneconomical for a large model company to follow you into it.

Lovable had a defensible position: build apps. It was specific, it was understood, and it was the thing that distinguished Lovable from general-purpose foundation models. Then the company announced it was adding AI agents and chat, moving toward direct competition with Anthropic and OpenAI on their own terrain. His read was immediate: "You guys had a great run. It's over."

His logic is that a startup competing horizontally against a foundation model company is competing on the dimension where the foundation model company has the most resources, the most data, and the clearest scale advantage.

A startup competing in a vertical narrow enough that the foundation model company would need a dedicated team to serve it properly is competing where the big company cannot easily follow.

We covered so many more brilliant insights on Zapier, DocuSign, Apple, the idea of pricing, the viability of category creation, and more.

[The GrowthStack @thegrowthstack_]

Some fascinating hot takes on Lovable, Claude, ChatGPT, Docusign, Zapier and more.

Focus is the only Moat left for AI startups.

[Arnav Bhardwaj @Arnav_ct]

Episode 41: Focus is The Moat to Survive The AI Apocalyse

Anthony Pierri (@apierriPMM) is one of the foremost voices in product marketing, having worked with 400 SaaS companies focusing on the one document that reveals whether a team has actually agreed on its strategy, the homepage.

He also argues that most SaaS is priced too high because founders overpromised to investors and then increased spending, forcing customers to subsidize the whole arrangement.

The RB2B case makes this concrete: Adam Robinson's bootstrapped, single-feature product is doing $7M ARR while its VC-backed competitors, who buried the same feature inside enterprise platforms to satisfy investor expectations, are doing less.

In our conversation, we get into:

✅How Focus is the only defensible position against an LLM
✅The Lovable mistake and why competing horizontally with Anthropic or OpenAI is a death sentence
✅Why RB2B is doing $7M ARR while VC-backed competitors with bigger platforms generate less
✅Why DocuSign's rebrand became a punchline inside brand positioning circles
✅How investor expectations push founders into pricing that customers end up rejecting

Listen Now 👉
https://t.co/W2KpsPsny5